Gilbert Hernandez

Boxers & Saints

Gene Luen Yang

Calling Dr. Laura: A Graphic Memoir

Nicole J. Georges

Hip Hop Family Tree

Ed Piskor

I spent a good portion of 2010 playing the Cassandra,
mongering doom and gloom about the heat death of the alternative comics
universe. Despite some important works—chief among them James Sturm’s Market Day, Chris Ware’s Lint (an entry in his ongoing Rusty Brown),and Gabriel Bá and Fábio Moon’s remarkable miniseries, Daytripper—ominous signs seemed unmistakable:
fewer new voices, fewer surprises, and, for the first time in a decade, fewer
publishers committing to the form. And by the end of 2011, prospects looking
even gloomier, as talented cartoonists like Nate Powell, Craig Thompson, Paul
Hornschemeier, Daniel Clowes, and Ben Katchor were celebrated on multiple best-of
lists with books that were far from their best.

What a difference a couple of years
make, especially when it comes to the comics form, which repeatedly defies its
seemingly imminent demise by rediscovering and reinventing itself. 2012 brought
us some remarkable work by established cartoonists—Chris Ware’s Building Stories;Alison Bechdel’s Are You My
Mother?;two works by Joe Sacco, Journalism and (with Chris Hedges) Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt; and
Derf Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer. The
year also offered us the first major solo work by Ed Piskor: Wizzywig,a composite biography of that mythic digital-age figure, the great
American hacker.

Perhaps most exciting, 2012 offered
clear evidence that the distinction between “mainstream” and “alternative”
comics was eroding to the point where a new generation of critics might soon
laugh at mine for formulaically mocking journalists who still feel obliged to
inform us that “comics aren’t just for kids anymore.” Matt Kindt’s complex and hallucinogenic
Mind Mgmt (Dark Horse), Ed Brubaker and
Sean Phillips’s paranormal noir Fatale
(Image); Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’s space opera Saga (Image); and Jonathan Hickman and Nick Pitarra’s mind-bending
alternative history The Manhattan
Projects (Image) all were born in 2012 in what we still call “mainstream”
publishing companies, and well into 2013 these series continued to offer some
of the best graphic storytelling in comics. Even in the rightly disparaged
world of contemporary superhero comics produced by Marvel Comics (Disney) and DC
(TimeWarner), 2012 gave us Matt Fraction’s surprisingly inventive Hawkeye, a superhero comic with more in
common with the Hernandez brothers’ Love
& Rockets than The Avengers
or any of its offshoots.

Sailing into 2013 buoyed by new
hopes, my newfound optimism was repaid many times over. Among the many riches
of the year are four books from 2013 that I will read, teach, and write about
for years to come.

Alternative comics as we know them began with the historic
partnership forged in 1982 between the Hernandez brothers and the small
independent publisher Fantagraphics, run by Gary Groth and Kim Thompson (who
passed away this year following a struggle with lung cancer). Over the course
of the next three decades, Fantagraphics would grow to be the most influential
institution in independent comics, while the Hernandezes’ Love & Rockets became the most important and understudied work
in American literature of the last generation.

For those not old enough to have
been there from the beginning and thus grayed (and thickened) alongside Gilbert
and Jaime’s characters (who age with us in “real time”), the thousands of pages
that make up Love & Rockets’
ongoing storyworld are daunting. But it is not only for readers that the decades-long duet has posed challenges: while
Jaime is slow and painstaking in his work, Gilbert describes himself
overflowing with stories, often chomping at the bit waiting for his younger
brother to catch up with his pace of production.

So it’s not surprising that 2013 saw
Gilbert finding an outlet for his overflowing muse with two stand-alone works, Marble Season (Drawn & Quarterly), a
beautiful memoir of a 1960s childhood, and Julio’s
Day, a bold and experimental distillation of everything Gilbert has learned
as a graphic storyteller over his long career. Julio’s Day is a 100-page story of a man, a family, and the
“American century,” with one page for each year of the life of a man born on
the eve of the 20th century and dying in his mother’s arms at its end. As we
watch his family and his nation change in dramatic ways, Julio attempts to
remain sheltered in his childhood home from the world outside—a world of change,
war, and desire. It is desire that drives him back home: an affair with a man
in the city opens up doors he can’t bring himself to walk through (he will live
to watch his grandnephew stride proudly through them, claiming a birthright
Julio denied himself).

In a form marked at every turn by
ellipses and breaks, this work seems always on the verge of stretching the gaps
too far, of losing the reader and the threads connecting the many characters,
historical events, and magical forces that wind through this muddy landscape.
But it is the work of a veteran graphic storyteller who knows just how tightly
he can afford to stretch the delicate membrane across the drum of the century.
This is a deeply moving work that continues to surprise long after it has been
put down.

If 2013 afforded Gilbert Hernandez an occasion to reflect on
a lifetime of storytelling, it was also the year in which the young phenom Gene
Luen Yang proved to the world, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was not to
be a one-hit wonder. Even if Yang had never produced another masterpiece, his widely
taught American Born Chinese (2006) would
suffice to guarantee him a place in the history of the form. And if his work
following American Born Chinese—including
The Eternal Smile (2009), with the
artist Derek Kirk Kim, and Level Up
(2011), with the artist Thien Pham—did not approach the power or success of his
breakout, his commitment to his “day job” as an educator at Bishop O’Dowd High
School in Oakland (and as an international advocate for graphic narrative as a
pedagogical tool) was justification enough.

With this year’s Boxers & Saints, Yang has secured
his place as one of our most powerful graphic storytellers, continuing to navigate
deep and turbulent waters with works equally accessible to adult and younger
readers. When I first heard Yang describe the premise of the book, in 2010, there
was tangible tension among some of the students in the auditorium. His goal, he
announced, was to create a historical novel of the Boxer Rebellion in China in
which he would explore his own dual identities as both a Chinese American and a devout Catholic by telling the
story from two opposing perspectives. Many young students in the room had read American Born Chinese as a story of a
westernized teenager coming to terms with his “authentic” identity, and in so
doing had missed the ways in which the book is also very much about navigating
and reconciling Chinese history and mythology with narratives and symbolism
drawn from the Christian Bible. So Yang’s account of his ambitions led to some
audible consternation. How could there be doubt as to where one was supposed to
identify?

Boxers
& Saints is an extended and eloquent answer to that question, one Yang
no doubt heard from many readers while he was working on the book. The first
volume, Boxers, tells the story of
the peasant Little Bao, whose family and pastoral existence are overturned by
foreign missionaries and the influence of Christianity encroaching on even his
remote hamlet. Motivated by rage at the injuries done his town and family, Bao is
transformed by the ancient gods into a mythical warrior, capable of taking on
the forces of imperialism and tyranny that are moving unchecked across his
nation. Bao’s power grows along with the size of his army, ultimately allowing
him to bring his righteous wrath to the gates of Peking itself.

There he will encounter the woman
he knew in his village only as “Four-Girl,” an unnamed, unwanted fourth daughter
who went on to find an identity and a name with the Christians. Her
transformation from “Four-Girl” to “Vibiana” is told in Saints, and just as the gods of ancient China work their magic on
Bao’s behalf, so does Joan of Arc come to Vibiana’s side to give her the
courage and conviction she needs to confront the storm coming her way. The
climactic encounter between our Boxer and our Saint serves as a deep and
powerful lesson in the spiritual and ethical power of ambivalence, double vision,
and second chances—and as Yang’s beautiful if heartbreaking response to those
who might understandably wish for answers drawn in starker black and white.

Different as they are, Yang and Hernandez both offer sweeping
and experimental historical novels. But it is history on a much more intimate scale
that is invoked in my third choice from 2013, Nicole J. Georges’s Calling Dr. Laura. This is the kind of
book a reviewer prays to find somewhere in the pile beside the desk,
particularly a reviewer feeling worn down precisely by the genre with which
Georges’s book aligns itself in its subtitle, “A Graphic Memoir.” Defenses down, expectations
low, and miles away from the Portland punk/zine scene that is Georges’s terra cognita, I ran smack into the best
graphic autobiography of 2013 in the opening weeks of the year.

With a deceptively understated
narrative voice, Georges leads us into a complex and beautifully structured
narrative about the lies families tell, the ways young bodies are twisted and
knotted by lies and secrets, the silences and deceptions that follow into
adulthood, and the answers and voices to be found in the most unlikely of
places—art and music, yes, but also a psychic and a flock of chickens. Without once dipping into the
vats of self-pity that are the blood and ink of so many graphic memoirists,
Georges tells her story with a wit, wisdom, and integrity that many artists
twice her age have yet to earn.

Alternating between the quotidian
and the absurd, grounded in a life lived, we have here what could be material
for a Hollywood movie: a father apparently returned from the dead, a
coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, a narrative of love and heartbreak, and
yes, an encounter with the titular Dr. Laura, the last person a young Left
Coast lesbian should be turning to for advice, as Georges’s soon-to-be-ex
points out. While any attempt to describe the book ends up making it sound frenetic
and unbelievable, the effect is precisely the opposite. Alison Bechdel blurbs
the book as “disarming and haunting, hip and sweet, all at once,” and that gets
it just about right. I can’t wait to see what Georges does next. Currently a
Fellow at James Sturm’s Center for Cartoon Studies, she is in the right place
to come up with something very special indeed.

If Georges’s Calling
Dr. Laura started off my year right, Ed Piskor’s Hip Hop Family Tree was the perfect way to ring it out. The first
volume in an ongoing history of hip hop, it covers the early years of the
movement’s rise in New York, from the mid-1970s to the emergence of MTV and the
nationalization of the hip hop movement in the early 1980s. As I mentioned above,
Piskor is the author of one of the best works of 2012, Wizzywig, and the two books cover much of the same period in terms
of history. But where Wizzywig
focuses on the emergence of an overwhelmingly white hacker culture, Hip Hop Family Tree is the story of a
very different kind of mash-up counterculture emerging from the empty lots of
the Bronx, where commercial pop and jerry-rigged sound systems turned an
economic wasteland into a space for creativity, pride, and the birth of a new
culture.

As he did with Wizzywig, Piskor serialized Hip
Hop Family Tree online, in this case at the webzine Boing Boing, and as
with the earlier work, Piskor has left the digital serialization up online even
after book publication—counter to much recent practice in independent comics in
recent years, but very much of a piece with both the hacking and hip hop
cultures from which he draws inspiration.

The book version of the first
volume of Hip Hop Family Tree is a
beautiful thing to behold. Printed in an oversize tabloid format (or, for
comics readers of a certain generation, the Marvel Comics Treasury Edition
format of the 1970s) and in beautifully retro “four-color” style, the book
recreates the pop energy and oversized ambitions of the period that gave birth
to these new superheroes: men and women like DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa,
Grandmaster Flash, and MC Sha-Rock.

This book stands as a reminder of
Piskor’s talents as a cultural historian, and also of the unique ability of the
comics form to tell the history of an art that mashes up commercial music with
street poetry, graffiti, and autobiography in order to create a music that is
simultaneously celebratory amid the blight of New York’s darkest decade and
expressive of experiences that commercial music of the time had no interest in recording.
Over the last generation, the comics form—itself a collage of word and image—has
proven itself ideal for chronicling the cacophonous and multimedia history of
modernity, most famously, perhaps, in the work of Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories).

With Hip Hop Family Tree, Piskor fully embraces the role of graphic
historian that he began to fulfill in his earlier work on the Beats and the
history of hacking. Hip Hop Family Tree
concludes with a short graphic essay in which he meditates on the formal and historical
connections between comics and hip hop. Both, he muses, are born of urban
landscapes during periods of dynamic change; both involve collage, collaboration,
alter egos, and epic battles. And both have thrived on the margins of mass
media industries simultaneously eager to exploit and distance themselves from
these “bastard children.” Piskor—having already experienced tremendous success
with the first printing of this first volume—has his dream job to attend to,
one that you will be able to follow in subsequent volumes and, even before
that, serialized regularly at Boing Boing.

But not without a final footnote. For all the excellent work in 2013, there remain some significant dark clouds. Financially, the market continues to be tough, with independent publishers like Fantagraphics in rough financial straits, forced to Kickstart its spring list following the death of Kim Thompson. Just as I was finishing up this review, I learned that one of the most innovative and ambitious art comics publishers, PictureBox, had announced the end of its run. Here is hoping that 2014 brings news as good on the publishing front as 2013 did on the creative.

Jared Gardner is Professor of English and Film at Ohio State University. His most recent books are Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling (2012) and The Rise and Fall of Early American Magazine Culture (2012). He also writes about comics and pop culture at guttergeek.com.